ABSTRACT
The middle chapter of the last part of the work, dedicated to the eclipse of unlicensed print culture in the course of regime change in 1989, examines how, switching from indirect legitimization exchange toward the direct compromise that triggered the transition, the leadership of the Civic Committee to Lech Wałęsa adopted a philosophy of political action which effectively abandoned the prefigurative vision and rendered samizdat social media obsolete. Transitional politics was a politics of exception, which in its ascending phase aimed at suspending the instituted forms of democratic mistrust that characterized the political culture in resistance, in order to concentrate oppositional agency under a single banner and a single leadership to achieve the political breakthrough. The unlicensed social media activists, faithful to the prefigurative vision, refused to embrace the expediency of transitional politics, cherishing the measure of liberty actually achieved over the uncertain prospects of breakthrough. Seeking shelter from the historical maelstrom, they found themselves on the margins of the transition process.
